“Hey, no lip,” he said lightly at one point and saw her face go stark white. “Charlotte.” Getting up, he walked around to sit beside her, his back to the table.
His instinct was to touch her, comfort her, but the way she held herself—shoulders hunched in and neck strained as she stared at the tabletop—told him she couldn’t handle such contact. Seeing her shiver, he went to the car and grabbed his jacket. She flinched when he put it over her shoulders and his gut clenched… but then she tugged the jacket around herself, her fingers tight on the lapels.
He sat again, and, angling his body to face her, braced one arm against the weathered wood of the table. “What did I say?” he asked when she shot him a quick look.
Her throat moved, fingers flexing and tightening. “No, it’s nothing.” A whisper.
“I’m not really a T-Rex, you know,” he said gently and got a guilty look in response, Charlotte’s cheeks flushing with color.
“How did you…” She shook her head, shoulders no longer hunched in. “You have to admit you chewed up people and spit them out that first week. Very T-Rex of you.”
Relieved she sounded more like her usual self, he risked tugging on one escapee curl. “I won’t use those words again.” It was obvious the term “No lip” had brought something bad to the surface.
Spark dimming once more, she bowed her head. “Sorry.”
“Why?” he said, continuing to play with the curl that had escaped the bun he hated with a vengeance. It was so distant and stiff and not at all like the fiery woman who was apt to snap at him when he snarled. “I got to touch this pretty hair because of it.”
Hot pink on her cheeks, her head jerking up. “That’s not—”
“Appropriate?” He leaned in close enough that it was pure torture not to bridge the final inches, taste the gold-dusted cream of her skin. “Should I stop?” He had to make dead certain they were on the same page. Because he was her boss, and because he wouldn’t do the same thing to her that some fucking bastard clearly already had.
The choice had to be Charlotte’s.
Huge hazel eyes met his before she got to her feet in a quick movement. “We should go.”
Gabriel rose with an inward smile. She hadn’t said no—and she was still holding his jacket around her. It was a start.
13
T-REX GIVES GOOD ORGASMS
CHARLOTTE CALLED MOLLY AFTER dinner, desperate to talk to her best friend.
“Charlie!” Molly’s excited face filled the screen of Charlotte’s laptop, her friend’s black hair a wild tumble around her head and her thin, royal-blue sweater sliding off one shoulder. “I’ve been dying to hear everything since your text!”
Charlotte rubbed her finger over a nonexistent spot on the bedspread, the laptop on her thighs. “I overreacted.”
“Wait.” Molly held up her phone. “It says here that T-Rex touched you. Are you telling me that was a lie?”
Rolling her eyes at her friend’s dramatic gasp, she said, “He put his coat around me… and kind of played with my hair.” God, she felt like a teenager saying that. “Just the strands at the side,” she clarified quickly when Molly squeaked.
“He played with your hair? Don’t tell me you don’t know what that means.”
Charlotte’s skin burned, her toes curling into the sheet. “Okay, it was maybe a signal.”
“Well, I suppose he could hardly drag you into his office and do bad, bad things to you.”
Charlotte’s panties went damp at the idea of being behind closed doors with a Gabriel who was no longer acting as her boss. A Gabriel who surely would do deliciously bad things to a woman who gave him the green light.
If that woman wasn’t a timid mouse.
Groaning, she dropped her face into her hands, giddy delight replaced by frustrated despair. “I had a flashback.”
Molly’s expression, when Charlotte looked up again, had changed from glee to gentle encouragement. “What happened?” asked the friend who’d walked with Charlotte through the darkness, who had seen the scars firsthand.
Drawing in a shaky breath, Charlotte forced herself to speak. “Gabriel said something in fun, but it was something Dick used to say.”
She hadn’t been able to say Richard’s name aloud for a long time. It was Molly who’d reduced him to Dick, and in so doing, stolen his power, or that had been the plan. Charlotte hadn’t quite managed to strip him of power in her mind, but she was getting there. She no longer had nightmares where she thought he was in the house, and she could get a full night’s sleep ninety percent of the time.
“What did T-Rex do afterward?” Molly asked, the white lines around her mouth telling Charlotte her best friend’s fury at Richard hadn’t abated an iota.
Charlotte thought of the warmth of Gabriel’s jacket, of the way he’d been so delightfully inappropriate with her. “He was wonderful.” The fact that the ride back had felt strained and awkward was her fault, not his. She’d been so angry and tense; the sudden flashback had come right when she’d begun to think she might have a shot at a life untainted by the ugliness of that brutal year.
“What am I going to do, Molly?” At least she had the long weekend to figure that out—with Monday being a public holiday, she wouldn’t see Gabriel till Tuesday.
“Given his goal-oriented nature,” Molly said solemnly, “I bet T-Rex gives good orgasms.” A waggle of her eyebrows that made Charlotte splutter with laughter. “I say let him have at it. It’ll be good stress relief for you.”